As usual, it’s been a long time since the last post. Although I don’t have difficulties talking to people, it is still strangely hard for me to post in english…

But let’s go to the news: the Voice Notes addin is already into tomboy Addins directory at the gnome svn server. Check it out [1] and apply a patch [2] to enable its compilation (it is disabled because is not stable yet).

Some notes about it:

– Present: it is not speech-to-text. At the current state, it’s just a recorder/player that keeps a voice record related to the note. And the main difference since the last post- no popup window.

Note visualization with Voice Notes addin enabled

– Future: it’s going to have *some* speech recognition and store only some keywords for indexation purposes. So the user will also be able to find references to the voice notes when searching, not only to the typed notes.

I’m going to make a screencast, and I’ll link it soon.

As we use to say in Brazil, “it is not the world’s 8th wonder”. But it is already usable and may become a very nice feature. There is a long road ahead, so this is just beginning. Suggestions and help are welcome. Hope you like it =)

After 3 days, I finally purchased a plug adapter and could recharge my laptop’s battery in Turkish power sockets. So, in a few hours and with a great help of my friend Raphael (he has some C# knowledge from his dark past at an evil software company) I could finish the first functional version of Tomboy’s Voice Notes!

While I don’t commit, take a look at this screenshot. (Of course you won’t open recorder and player at the same time, it’s just a demonstration!)

Tomboy Voice Notes Addin

Oh, if I’m at Istanbul, I’m attending GUADEC. This is great! Free software, free parties, free memory key, free t-shirts :) I met my SoC mentor, Nickolay. And I agree with you all that Istanbul is a very beautiful city, with its wonderful chaos and the Bosphorus view!

This blog is not abandoned. Ok, there is a lot of spider webs here, but I didn’t forget it exists =P

My GSoC project had some advances in the past weeks, but not as fast as I wish. But now, my university activities are finally finished, and that means no preocupations with calculus, physics, mechanics and any other of these boring stuffs that will make me an engineer.

Long time with no posts. The last 4 days were very, very bad, with an inflamation in my left shoulder that kept me away from classes, job and code. (So many pain, as if my shoulder was remembering me all the time “hello, I’m here!”)

The only important thing I’ve done was install Bugzilla on my machine at my internship. That was not hard to do, even on a XP system. My boss want me to be the admin and teach my mates how to use it. It will be funny, I think…

Well, back to the real world, I studied gstreamer- not that much, but a basic idea- and talked to my mentor, that clarified some points to me. Now it’s time to continue coding the recorder/player for my Tomboy voice-notes addin.

And last, but not least, I’d like to thank every one that has commented giving me suggestions and tips. FOSS community is even nicer that I thought ;)

The only important news in my GSoC project, at this moment, is a language change. As gstreamer-sharp bindings aren’t working, I’ll need to make the recording system in C. So, for now I’ll code in C# just for calling this recording system from inside Tomboy.

It may be good, because C is more familiar to me. But in the other hand, I could be improving my knowledge in C# and I’m losing this opportunity. Anyway, whatever the language, I think it won’t be hard to do, and more projects will come in the future. So, no worries.

In the last weeks, I had trouble using SVN in my University. I talked to the network admin, he said it should be working, and now he is going to fix it. That’s good news for next week. But I couldn’t wait: I did an incredible workaround (“gambiarra” in portuguese… do you know Gambiarra? :P ), so incredible that I’m ashamed of writing about it in details.

I’ve been reading several tomboy addins code, and got the idea of the implementations. I’ve already coded something I think will be the “skeleton” for my addin. C# is very easy – but I think it’s weird. Even Java is more elegant… Anyway, I prefer Python ;D.

Monodevelop is very nice. Monodoc is cool. I just didn’t get the point on not using devhelp instead. (Okay, maybe they wanted to keep .NET documentation grouped and isolated from the rest…).

Everything seems to be alright, the only problem now is: I haven’t eat pizza for two weeks. I ran out of money traveling to Porto Alegre (FISL) and now I’m desperated!

P.S.: 10% of my GSoC money is reserved to pizza. Plus other 10%, for home-delivered pizza, and 10% for that frozen pizzas we can buy in supermarkets.

I had to format my hard disk two days ago- for nasty, closed source, proprietary reasons- and reinstall Ubuntu 7.10. Then I got connected to the internet, and requested aptitude to update the system. It was painfull, 285 MB of download.

Yes, I know. Tomorrow, Cannonical will release the new Ubuntu… oh, sh*t.

But that’s okay, now I’m getting all the stuff I will need for GSoC and I hope to have it all before the weekend. And I would like to thank my friend Thiago Santos, a.k.a. “Meson”, for the C# book… =)